


Stardust

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Character Study, Fluff, M/M, Mornings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:54:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29614587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: The sky seems kinder when there's a golden polestar to guide you home.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Comments: 13
Kudos: 258





	Stardust

**Author's Note:**

> Practicing writing short stories! I will probably do more of this than anyone wants, and I am sorry! Exclamation points! 
> 
> If you make any kind of FMA fanwork (or you'd like to), check out the [applications for the Equivalent Exchange Anthology](https://equivalentexchangeanthology.carrd.co/#applications), which are due February 28! :D Apps are very fast and very easy.
> 
> This fic is yet another iteration of the Default Tierfal AU, set several years after BH except that Ed keeps his automail because I have a thing for that, etc etc.

Roy thinks, sometimes, about the span of the universe—about the breadth of infinity; about the distance between one mouth, one breath, one heart and another. About atoms. About electricity. About how infinitesimal human beings are next to supernovas and the space between the stars. About how staggeringly small and utterly meaningless a single life should be against the inconceivable vastness of everything.

He thinks about how far and how long light has to travel through the frigid silence before it’s ever seen.

Roy thinks, often, about how little he is, and how little he can do. He thinks about force and physical laws; about droplets in the sea; about the absurd futility of trying to make even the slightest impression on the relentless wash of time. About how none of it matters, really. About how much of the world is emptiness, and soundlessness, and tiny creatures being crushed.

Perhaps that’s part of why Ed hits him like a comet and leaves a smoking crater a half-mile wide.

Ed came back from Xing and Creta and the furthest edges of the enormous world with a knowing glint in his eye. They were animal eyes, before—when he was young and slowly-growing and desperate and ferocious; when he snarled more than he spoke; when he had to be gradually convinced not to bite any hand reaching towards him, because some of those hands were offering help, not trying to take more from him. There’s a sliver of that left in him—the wildness—but he knows it, now; he’s in control of it. He’s more dangerous as a roaming wolf than he ever was as a collared stray.

And he has always defied every protocol that has ever governed Roy’s world.

Ed spits in the eye of eternity. Ed is a living, breathing, swearing (laughing, grinning, gasping) relic of a long-dead civilization lost to time. Ed rewrites the rules around himself when they don’t suit him; Ed routinely looks the unthinkable, the undoable, the unimaginable in the face and tries them all anyway, and he succeeds so often that you _have_ to start to wonder—

Ed is precious metal incarnate, and would switch the sugar and the salt right before Roy pours coffee if Roy was ever fool enough to tell him so. Ed is a force too great and far too elemental to be bowed by the caprices of other human beings. Ed has never in his life let silence swallow him. Ed makes his own light.

Roy does not believe in destiny—the prospect of a grander plan assigns any given individual far too much significance.

But this was inevitable, in a strange way. The person that he is could only ever have wound up here; the person that Ed might permit him to _become_ —

Ed treats the immensity of the universe as a playground. Ed reads the futility of existence as a challenge. Ed interprets the laws of nature as a puzzle that he intends to solve.

Ed doesn’t even care about going down in history; Ed doesn’t even dream of absolution. Ed just hates authority so much that he will never let the petty little cosmos tell him what to do.

Roy wakes too early to a half-dawn, and Ed is sitting up in bed bathed in feeble, sallow light. It glimmers gently on the curved plates of the automail; it drags down his throat and collarbones with a hesitation no longer familiar to someone who’s kissed him and given in to his gravity and let themselves be redefined. It strips the gold sparks from his hair; he could be any long-haired blond bent over a notebook, with the sheets curled in around his hips like a frozen maelstrom.

Almost, anyway—he could _almost_ be anyone. Ed can never really be anything other than himself. Ed can never really be mistaken for anybody unimportant.

“Sorry,” Ed says. He reaches out without looking up; he has the pencil tucked between his first two fingers, and the eraser taps Roy’s forehead as Ed’s hand settles gently on the top of his head and then retreats again. “I had this weird fuckin’ dream about being back at Ling’s place, and there was a dragon, and I set, like, an alkahestric fuse on an array, and I wanted to see if maybe I could get that to work.”

Roy shift-crawls across the space between them and wraps both arms around Ed’s waist. He attempts to bury his face in Ed’s side without interfering with the note-taking—which may not be particularly physically feasible, but with Ed…

With Ed, _impossible_ means something different, and that’s enough.


End file.
